I wasn't sure whether or not this should go under AMD64 or not, but since the problem itself seems to be unrelated to the architecture, I posted here. I am currently installing Gentoo onto my AMD64-3000+ box with two sata drives in raid0. I used the dodmraid option to start the install and was able to partition my drives fine. I also patched LILO and that seemed to work just fine as well. The problem, however, was during the LILO install, near then end I got four beeps and the error: "Could not determine root partition!" Attempting to run LILO gave the error: "Fatal: Sorry, don't know how to handle device 0xfe01". I also tried using grub, and on the first reboot, it appeared as if it would boot (the grub splash appeared, I selected the OS, and hardware was being posted), but then it said it was unable to determine the root partition. I checked over my fstab and lilo.conf files, as well as the lilo ebuild, and was not able to determine why the root partition was not able to be determined. Here is the contents of my lilo.conf:

I thought that perhaps the fact that the patch is 22.6 and the LILO version is 22.7 might be the problem, but a friend of mine used the same patch on his 22.7, and he said it worked.

I would put my dmesg in here, but is there a way to paste things into Links2 input areas from other screens without a GUI? There's no way I'm typing that thing in here =). After reading hours of forums, I couldn't quite find anything to match this exactly. I thought maybe it was a typo in my lilo.conf or fstab files, but unless there is one in the above, then I am out of ideas. Thanks in advance.

Last edited by GuMBi on Fri Dec 02, 2005 3:56 am; edited 1 time in total

I also tried using grub, and on the first reboot, it appeared as if it would boot (the grub splash appeared, I selected the OS, and hardware was being posted), but then it said it was unable to determine the root partition.

It sounds like GRUB worked, but your kernel/initrd are not setup correctly to boot from a dmraid device.

haha, so I figured it out less than an hour after posting... Figures. So initially I had forgotten to include nvidia sata support in my kernel... Then after doing that, I had rebooted because I wanted to try LILO again. So then after that failed, I had to chroot and all that again, but this time I had forgotten to mount proc...Once again So after mounting proc, GRUB worked fine and now I have a bootable OS